Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret the Dodgers have been hurting for pitching because, well, their pitchers have been getting hurt. As during last October’s championship run, at times they’ve resorted to bullpen games, including a couple with Shohei Ohtani serving as an opener while rebuilding his pitch count following UCL reconstruction surgery. Taking a page from previous seasons under manager Dave Roberts, they’ve also snuck in a handful of innings from position players, not only when they’ve been on the short end of blowouts, but when they’ve led. Enrique Hernández has pitched five times, four in games in which the Dodgers thrashed opponents. Even with tighter rules in place for when teams can hand the ball to position players, the trend is nearing its height in popularity again following a recent dip.

It’s been nearly three years since I checked in on the trend of position players pitching. What was once a fun little beat to cover became less enjoyable as the practice proliferated to the point that Major League Baseball had to codify when teams could do it. Thankfully the occasions themselves are still appropriately light-hearted, full of giggles, eephus pitches, and batting-practice fastballs.

Here’s the evolution of the trend over the past decade, expressed as a percentage of total relief appearances:

Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Nico Hoerner hit a home run on Tuesday. It wasn’t exactly a tape measure shot – the ball left his bat at 97 mph and traveled a projected 364 feet, making it 31 feet shorter and nearly 8 mph softer than the average home run this season – but he certainly got all of it. Plenty of players have hit even softer and shorter homers. It was mostly noticeable because it was Hoerner’s first home run of the season.

Among qualified players, Hoerner ranks in the bottom 10 in hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and both max and 90th-percentile exit velocity. He’s a contact hitter, not a power hitter, and it works just fine. He’s running a 102 wRC+ this season, a mark he’s bettered in each of the last four seasons. Still, he’s hit at least seven home runs in each of the last three seasons, and he was due to get on the board at some point. You can’t say the same for Xavier Edwards.

Over three partial seasons in Miami, the 25-year-old Edwards has hit just one home run in 678 plate appearances. He’s the only qualified player this season with a barrel rate of 0% — that is to say he has not yet hit a barrel over his 291 plate appearances and 216 batted balls. I bring all this up because Hoerner’s home run leaves Edwards as the only player who currently has enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title without a single home run. He’s the only player on pace to join an increasingly exclusive fraternity: The Homerless Qualifier Club.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I’ve had to re-evaluate a strongly held belief. It’s an important thing for responsible adults to do every now and then; even if the opinion wasn’t wrong at the time, conditions can change. And I’m not too proud to identify such a situation now.

Here’s the old take, the one I’m revising now: Jeremy Peña is the most overrated player in baseball. At the time, it made sense. But it definitely doesn’t now. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets are not the fastest team in baseball. Wait, let’s be more specific. With an average sprint speed of 26.9 feet per second, the Mets are the second-slowest team in baseball. When their baserunning makes the news, it’s rarely for a good reason. Maybe they’re costing themselves hits and extra bases by failing to hustle out of the box, or maybe they’re running the bases in the wrong direction altogether. Either way, you could be forgiven for thinking that baserunning is costing the Mets runs after seeing something like this:

In fact, the Mets have been the 10th-best baserunning team in baseball according to our baserunning metrics, seventh best according to Statcast, and 11th best according to Baseball Prospectus. What makes this contrast even more fun is that in addition to being slow, they haven’t been amazing at taking the extra base either. BP ranks them 15th on that front, while Statcast has them all the way down at 26th. They go for the extra base as often as you expect them to, but they succeed at a below-average rate. For all the sabermetric angst about how being a valuable baserunner is more than simply piling up stolen bases, the Mets are, in fact, accruing all their baserunning value by stealing bases. But they’re still not stealing all that many bases.

The Mets’ 72 stolen base attempts are tied for the 17th most in baseball, and their 62 steals put them in a three-way tie for 11th. I’m sure you see where I’m going here. All this value is coming from efficiency; the Mets are converting 86.1% of their stolen base attempts — the highest rate in baseball this season, and the eighth highest ever recorded. That’s right: The second-slowest team in the league is running the eighth-highest stole base rate of all time.

I don’t mean to be too dramatic here. I know the Mets are on an all-time top-10 list, but that’s to be expected. The league recently introduced rules that made basestealing much easier. They’re only one spot above the Cubs, who have been way more prolific on the bases, and fully half the teams in the top 10 are from the past three seasons. Still, I want to note a couple things about this list. The Cubs are the sixth-fastest team in baseball this year. Pete Crow-Armstrong, a top-15 player in terms of average sprint speed, has stolen more than a quarter of their bases. It’s not shocking that they’re up there. Further, the Mets appear on this list twice. In 2023, they were safe 88.7% of the time, the second-highest mark ever. The 2024 Mets rank 27th. Over the past three seasons, the Mets lead baseball with an 85.9% success rate, 2.5 points above the Phillies in second place. There really is something going on in Queens, and clearly, it’s not particularly dependent on speed.

Just to be sure about that last part, I ran some numbers. Like all teams, the Mets have their faster baserunners doing more stealing than their slower baserunners. I considered the possibility that they’re just only letting their faster players try to steal, but that’s not it. If you prorate team speed by the stolen base attempts of each player, their sprint speed moves up to 27.7 feet per second, which moves them from 29th all the way up to 25th. The Mets are just great at stealing bases.

I would really love to believe all of this is related to the team’s baserunning mantra, “Let’s Boogie,” coined by first base coach and run game coordinator Antoan Richardson. The Mets have been singing his praises over the past two seasons, but that is not particularly surprising. Light coaching hagiography is a staple of spring training coverage. Still, in this case, I am at least slightly inclined to believe the hype. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever been around,” said Juan Soto in April. “He’s really good at that – checking on pitchers, what they do and how we can jump at it, when we can be more relaxed. I’ve trusted him twice and got it twice. So I feel like he knows what he’s talking about.” Soto is on pace for a career-high of 18 steals despite being the third-slowest outfielder in baseball (minimum 10 competitive runs).

It’s not just that Soto has increased his stolen base total so dramatically. It’s what I saw when I watched all of his steals this season. I recommend you keep the sound on, but even if you don’t, it is very easy to see what’s happening here.

The common thread is Soto got enormous jumps. The catcher didn’t bother to throw the ball in half of these clips. The only time it seemed like there might actually be a play was when he ran on the Blue Jays battery of Yariel Rodríguez and Alejandro Kirk. Rodríguez grades out as above average at controlling the running game, and Kirk is one of the best catchers in the game at that particular skill. Soto is slow enough that he needed every bit of his big jump. There’s no universe in which he runs here unless he is certain he has something on Rodríguez.

The same thing goes for Francisco Lindor, who is currently on pace for 26 steals even though his sprint speed ranks slightly below the league average for the first time in his career.

Just like Soto, Lindor is getting enormous jumps. He has the pitcher’s timing down cold. Sometimes he takes off before the broadcast even cuts to the pitcher! The Mets are stealing bases in all the right spots, and you can see it in the numbers. Baseball Savant keeps detailed measurements of both primary and secondary leads, and most of the time, the Mets are among the most conservative teams in baseball. At just 11.2 feet, their primary leads rank 28th. Their secondary leads rank 17th, but when you combine them with the extremely short primary leads, by the time the pitcher has released the ball, they’ve traveled an average of 14.8 feet, the fourth-lowest mark in the game. But those are just the overall numbers.

Things are completely different when the Mets are stealing. They’re very nearly the most brazen team in the league. Both their primary and secondary leads rank second in baseball. They end up 25.9 feet off the bag by the time the pitcher releases the ball, trailing the first-place Padres by just under two inches. No team has a bigger gap between their average lead and their we’re-about-to-steal lead than the Mets. In fact, the difference is 11.1 inches, and no team is within even a foot of that mark.

Because the Mets aren’t getting picked off or caught stealing, we can see they’re making great decisions about when to steal. And because they’re getting huger leads and even huger jumps, we can see they’re extraordinarily confident in those decisions. To be clear, not every player on the team is getting monster jumps. Luisangel Acuña has elite speed, and he’s relied on it to go 11-for-12 in stolen base attempts even without enormous jumps. Still, the Mets really do seem to know when to go, and that comes down to coaching and preparation. Before you boogie, you’ve got to study.

You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Maybe because your Aunt Debbie shared a post from her favorite social media influencer. Maybe because you passed the time during a layover at the airport perusing the self-help books in the Hudson News near your gate. Like most self-help tropes, whether or not it hits for you depends a little on your life circumstances and a little on how you choose to apply it. When it comes to sports fandom, emotional hedging can be a useful tool to avoid disappointment, or maybe you prefer projecting confidence to manifest a desired outcome. And if you’re a Phillies fan, you’ve perfected the art of oscillating wildly between the two over the course of a single game. You even have a handy meme with a meter that only ever points to one extreme or the other:

(Please excuse the mismatched needle sizes and logo alignment. These images are precious internet relics that have been downloaded, clumsily edited, re-uploaded, compressed, and decompressed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The pixelation is earned like callouses on the hands of a skilled laborer.)

But the formula seems to assume that expectations are set and controlled by the person in search of a happy existence. The entire notion is upended when mathematical models based on historical outcomes become the source for baseline expectations. In this scenario, if your team is outperforming expectations, then you can enjoy the banked wins, but you do so in fear of the rainier days that surely lie somewhere in the team’s future forecast. Whereas if your team is underperforming expectations, things might feel dire, but there’s reason to believe sunnier days lie ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people with an MLB.tv account and no serious responsibilities, I spent a large portion of Wednesday afternoon watching the Pirates-Brewers game. This midweek businesspersons’ special featured one of the most hotly anticipated starting pitching matchups of the season so far: Paul Skenes vs. Jacob Misiorowski.

Skenes, as you know, possesses such electrifying talent it became possible for a Pittsburgh Pirate to become one of the most famous ballplayers in the league. Misiorowski is just three starts into his big league career, but already his prodigious fastball velocity has made him a hipster favorite in baseball circles. Skenesian mainstream celebrity is sure to follow. Read the rest of this entry »